Articles Posted inHedge Funds

A group of hedge funds, including Oaktree Capital Management LP and Glendon Capital Management LP, has filed a lawsuit against the federal government in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The hedge fund group are Puerto Rico bondholders who could suffer losses from bonds that were issued in 2008 to help the island’s retirement system, the Puerto Rico Employment Retirement System (ERS), stay afloat. Unfortunately, beginning in 2013, the ERS investments faltered, leading the pension system toward bankruptcy.

The hedge funds’ complaint comes after PROMESA, the federal oversight board that was appointed to help the island of Puerto Rico address its $73 billion of debt, placed the Commonwealth’s biggest public retirement fund under bankruptcy protection to help restructure $3 billion in pension obligation bonds (commonly called POBs).

The ERS’s bonds can be paid for by pension contributions that public employers make toward the retirements of their employees. The hedge fund plaintiffs thought that these payments would go to them first. However, in June, the federal oversight board approved legislation to transfer these employer contributions beyond the pension system and away from these creditors. Now, the hedge funds want a court order determining that the move was illegal. They are seeking $3.1 billion in principal plus interest on the ERS bonds.

After Pleading Guilty, Massachusetts Money Manager Must Repay Investors
Stephen Eubanks is sentenced to 30 months behind bars for bilking investors of $437K. He also must pay restitution in that amount to his more than 20 victims.

Eubanks presented himself as a hedge fund manager at Eubiquity Capital, which he founded. He raised over $700K from investors and claimed that he was running a hedge fund that had ties with UBS (UBS), TD Ameritrade (AMTD), Fidelity, and Goldman Sachs (GS).

While Eubanks invested some of the clients’ funds for them he also spent a healthy amount of their money on his own spending. Eubanks also is accused of on occasion operating his fund as if it were a Ponzi scam.

Over the weekend, Yasuna Murakami, a Cambridge-Massachusetts based hedge fund manager, was arrested and charged with wire fraud. Murakami, who managed MC2 Capital Management LLC, is accused of misappropriating investors’ funds in a Ponzi-like scam. The arrest and criminal charges come a few months after the state’s regulator, Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin, filed his own administrative case against Murakami for the fraud.

Prosecutors are accusing the hedge fund manager of seeking to bilk investors. The MC2 Capital Canadian Opportunities Fund was supposed to grant American investors exposure to a Donville Kent Asset Management-supervised fund. Instead, Murakami allegedly misused investors’ money to pay for his bills, including purchases at expensive department stores, as well as to make his own investments in the fund.

He is accused of using investors’ money to pay other investors in two other MC2 hedge funds and allegedly misappropriating money from those funds. Under the charging statute, If convicted, Murakami could face up to 20 years in prison, supervised release, a fine, and be ordered to pay up to two times the gross loss or gain.

Tamer Moumen, an ex-hedge fund manager, has pleaded guilty to wire fraud. He now faces up to 20 years in prison for a $9M investment.

Moumen defrauded over 50 investors. Many of his investors were close to retirement age. He advised dozens of them to liquidate retirement accounts, among other investments, and let him handle their funds.

Moumen used their funds to support his own spending, including the purchase of a $1M home, and also to pay back earlier investors. Moumen claimed to manage tens of millions of dollars through Crescent Ridge Capital Partners. He told clients he was a successful trader even though he lacked experience managing hedge funds and had lost money investing in securities before.

Federal Reserve Imposes First Fine to a Bank Over A Volcker Rule Violation
For violating the Volcker Rule’s ban on making risky market bets, Deutsche Bank (DB) must pay a $157M fine for not making sure its traders didn’t make such bets and for allowing its currency desks to engage in online chats with competitors, during which time they allegedly disclosed positions. It was just last year that the German lender admitted that it did not have sufficient systems in place to keep track of activities that could violate the ban.

Under the Volcker Rule, banks that have federal insured deposits are not allowed to bet their own funds. They also are supposed to makes sure that when their traders help clients sell and buy securities, they aren’t engaging in bet making.

For the system lapses, the Federal Reserve fined Deutsche Bank $19.7M. The remaining $136.9M fine is for the chats and because the bank purportedly did not detect when currency traders were revealing positions or trying to coordinate strategies with competitors.

Former Wells Fargo and LPL Financial Broker Receives 41-Month Prison Term for Elder Financial Fraud
Robert N. Tricarico, an ex-broker for both Wells Fargo Advisors (WFC) and LPL Financial (LPLA), will serve 41 months behind bars and pay restitution of over $1.2M after he pleaded guilty to elder financial fraud. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which brought a civil case against Tricarico, has barred him from the securities industry.

Court documents note that from 1/2010 to 6/2013, Tricarico was the financial adviser for a sick and elderly investor. He misappropriated over $1.1M from her by writing a number of checks to himself without the client’s consent, misappropriated checks written to her, liquidated her coin collection, and used her funds for his own expenses.

He has also admitted to bilking two other victims of $20K when he falsely represented that their money would go toward a business venture. He kept their money for himself.

Chicago Hedge Fund Manager Gets Over Four Years in $1.8M Fraud
Clayton Cohn is sentenced to more than four years behind bars and he will pay $1.55M in restitution for targeting military veterans in a $1.8M hedge fund fraud. Cohn is an ex-US Marine. He pleaded guilty to the criminal charges against him.

Cohn is accused of pretending to be a successful hedge fund manager to persuade clients to invest with his Marketaction Capital Management. Of the over $1.8M that was invested,he lost more than $1.5M and spent at least $400K on his luxury lifestyle and business investments.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission had brought civil charges against him in 2013 when they accused Cohn of soliciting investors through his Veterans Financial Education Network. The non-profit was supposed to help veterans handle their money. Instead, he diverted some of their funds toward himself. The regulator stayed its case against him following the federal indictments. Now, the civil fraud charges will proceed.

A battle of hedge funds, and their competing interests, has erupted in Puerto Rico over the last few weeks. This week, hedge funds Tilden Park Capital Management LP, Whitebox Advisors LLC, Merced Capital LP, and GoldenTree Asset Management LP filed a motion asking a court to impose a legal stay that would delay the lawsuit filed by general obligation bondholders that want Puerto Rico to stop directing sales-tax revenue away from the general fund. These hedge funds that submitted the motion collectively hold about $2 billion of tax revenue bonds, which are called COFINA bonds, locally.

Meantime, the general obligation bondholders that filed the lawsuit are also hedge funds. They include entities under the management of Aurelius Capital Management, FCO Advisors, Autonomy Capital, Covalent Partners, Monarch Alternative Capital, and Stone Lion Capital Partners. Earlier this month, they asked a court to stop the island from using sales-tax revenue to pay back COFINA debt. Those funds believe that the sales tax revenue should pay back the general obligation bonds first because Puerto Rico’s constitution states that general obligation should be repaid before other debt. However, the hedge funds holding the COFINAs that are requesting the legal stay are arguing that COFINA’s share of the sales-and-use-tax should not be “subject to clawback” in the event of a payment shortfall of the general obligation bonds.

This fight is playing out at the same time the U.S. Government is trying to help the U.S. Commonwealth with its financial crisis. PROMESA, which stands for the Puerto Rico Oversight Management and Economic Stability Act, is the new law that includes the legal stay that the CONFINA holders want imposed. The stay postpones creditor lawsuits against the island until February 15, 2017 in order to give Puerto Rico time to work out how to repay the $70 billion of debt it owes. Although Puerto Rico is way overdue on $1.8 billion of principal plus interest payments, this includes what the island owes on general obligation bonds, the Commonwealth paying back COFINAs.Continue reading

A number of hedge funds with Puerto Rico general obligation bonds want a court to stop the U.S. territory from using its sales-tax revenue to pay back other debt. Those hedge funds say that such an action is a violation of the Commonwealth’s constitution.

To date, the Commonwealth owes nearly $13 billion of general obligation bonds. Under its constitution, Puerto Rico is required to pay back its general obligation bonds before paying off other expenses. According to the plaintiffs, part of the territory’s’ sales tax revenue is supposed to go toward that repayment.

The plaintiffs sued Puerto Rico Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla to stop the territory from moving money away from bondholders, which they say violates the new federal law concerning Puerto Rico, called PROMESA. The hedge funds submitted their amended complaint last week, in which they added the Puerto Rico Sales Tax Financing Corp., commonly called COFINA, as a defendant. The plaintiffs include entities under the management of Aurelius Capital Management, Covalent Partners, Autonomy Capital, Monarch Alternative Capital, FCO Advisors, and Stone Lion Capital Partners.

Investment Advisor Firm Accused of Paying Off Terminally Ill Patients to Commit Fraud
The SEC has filed fraud charges against Donald Lathen and his Eden Arc Capital Management. Lathen is accused of recruiting at least 60 individuals who had less than six months to live and agreeing to pay them $10K each for the use of their names on joint brokerage accounts. When one of these individuals would die, he would allegedly redeem the investments by falsely representing that he and the terminally individual person were joint account holders.

Lathen recruited the terminally ill patients through contacts he had at hospices and nursing homes. In reality, it was Lathen’s hedge fund that owned the option investments.

As a result, of the purported omissions and misrepresentations, issuers paid over $100M in early redemptions. Lathen is accused of violating the custody rule by not properly putting the securities and money from the hedge fund in an account under the name of the fund or in one that held only client money and securities.

SEC Stops Trading in Neromamam Ltd.
The SEC has stopped the trading of Neuromama Ltd. (NERO) shares. The shares trade on the mostly unregulated over-the-counter markets and the regulator is concerned about transactions that may be “potentially manipulative, as well as other red flags that have purportedly been cropping up for years.

Neruomama’s paper value went up times four to $35B this year despite not much volume. The company’s shares went up by four times to $56/share. (On January 15, ’14, its value was $4.73B.)